Mark Simon, co-founder of Aargh! Animation, set off last November to
start another animated venture called A&S Animation in Orlando,
Florida. Right out of the gates, the toonco started production on a
13 x one-minute short series called Timmy's Lessons in Nature.
Budgeted at US $38,500 per episode, the comedic offering is tagged the
following way: "See Timmy saddle a moose. Watch Timmy pet a porcupine.
Timmy is a moron." The property is co-owned with California-based House
of Blaze Productions, and while there weren't any TV rights secured
at press time, Simon says that there is some European interest in Timmy,
in addition to a theatrical and video deal finalized at the end of February
with California's Spike & Mike. Five eps of Timmy (slated
for completion early this summer) will air in select U.S. Theaters in Spike & Mike's Sick & Twisted Festival of Animation in
June, with subsequent details regarding the video element pending at
press time.

They draw lines at the cutting edge

Orlando Sentinel
August 2, 2001
By: Roger Moore

Excerpts:
To the folks who 'toon, Spike & Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival
of Animation is like Cannes and Sundance rolled into one. Getting
your short animated film included in this touring compilation film
is animation's Lotto jackpot.

"You get in that, you're following in the footsteps of John Lasseter
(Toy Story), Beavis and Butt-head (created by Mike Judge)
and Nick Park (Wallace & Gromit, Chicken Run)," said Orlando
animation director Mark Simon.

In Timmy's Lessons in Nature, a banjo twangs and a chubby
little redheaded boy who doesn't fit into his scout uniform experiences
the wonders of the wild in some not-so-fun ways.

He whacks a snake, which promptly pounces on him and tries to swallow
him whole.

"Lesson One: Avoid Snakes."

Timmy gallops across a darkened pasture to tip a cow. He misses and
winds up giving Bossy a rectal exam.

"Lesson Two: Aim When Cow Tipping."

He greets a rabid fox by smacking it with a lollipop, with fur-flying
results.

"Lesson Three: Avoid Rabid Animals."

"We created this book of rules for Timmy when we started the films,"
said Jeanne Simon, Mark's wife and a writer on the series. "He can't
be mean, but he never learns."

"We started showing the first Timmy at festivals; it started
winning prizes [at Houston, Cal State Northridge and ASFIA, a French
animation society] and then we heard from Spike," Simon said.

Craig Decker of La Jolla, CA., the 'Spike' of Spike & Mike's
animation festivals, has been foisting odd 'toons on art cinema
audiences since 1977. He laughed at the first "Timmy."

"I said, 'If the rest of them are as funny as this, I'll take as
many of these as you guys can make by June,'" he said. "I liked the
look of the nerd. It's corny and it's direct, and that, to me, is
funny. That snake bludgeoning has face with multiple strikes, that
is such a surprise that it makes me laugh every time I see it."

"We all love Timmy; he's our baby," Simon said. "I'd love to see
him get a series. And what I'd really love to do is what the Aardman
people [the Wallace & Gromit team] did. They made short
animated films to get attention, won some festivals, got on Spike
& Mike, got more work and money to do bigger pieces, and then
they made a feature film (Chicken Run)."

Motion Capture UsersDispel
the Myths
by Christine Bunish

Motion capture has come a long way from its origins as a technology
designed to help other orthopedic surgeions pinpoint irregularities
in the human gait. Today motion capture aids producers and animators
of videogames, corporate tapes, educational and informational materials,
films, TV and online programming in crafting animations prized for
their subleties and realism.

But a lot of artists and animators are still resistant to motion
capture...

Good Morning Orlando

August
28, 2001
Fox - WOFL

Interview with Mark Simon about the Timmy series.

Melissa Ross, of Good Morning Orlando, hosted a 3 and a half minute
on-air interview with Mark about his series Timmy's Lessons In
Nature. Mark was able to announce on-air that the shorts had just
won at another children's festival in Chicago the night before.

The interview also covered the theatrical release of the first 3
shorts of the series in the new Spike & Mike Sick & Twisted
Festival of Animation. The touring film will hit 50 cities in
North America during 2001 and 2002. Other topics covered were the
development of the series and future plans for Timmy.

"I first saw the character in a proposed children's book called
"Can I Keep It" that one of my animators created."
says Simon. "I saw a number of possibilities for the character
so I sat down with my wife, a producer for Nickelodeon, and the creator
and we designed the series around this moronic kid who never learns."

The station ran portions of two of the Timmy shorts. They ran portions
of Lesson 1, where Timmy is repeatedly struck in the face by
a snake, three times. Those portions ran both full screen and as an
insert next to another reporter, co-anchor Michael Brooks, after Mark's
interview.

Brooks
called out to the control room, "Yeah, I'd like to see some more
of that Timmy. Can we re-rack that and show us the snake bite again?"
The segment began to run. "We should run this and I'll just watch
it like everyone at home." At that point the snake viciously
bites Timmy in the face and the entire stage crew can be heard laughing
in the background. Brooks continued, "I can't compete with that,
you know?! Timmy's got me beat."

Local Production Companies
Support American Cancer SocietyPress Release

Excerpts:
ORLANDO - Fund raising has never been so animated. The American Cancer
Society’s Cattle Barons’ Ball has a new character to pitch their event.

To
help raise awareness for the American Cancer Society’s annual Cattle
Barons’ Ball, taking place May 4th. Ad agency Yesawich Pepperdine
& Brown asked Mark Simon of A&S Animation, Inc. if he would
produce this years Cattle Barons’ Ball commercial promoting this American
Cancer Society’s cancer fund raising event. They had just seen samples
of A&S’s motion capture computer generated animation and thought
it would provide a distinctive look for this years commercial.

Simon, who lost his mother just over a year ago to cancer, was quick
to jump on board. “This was something I had to do,” says Simon. “I
didn’t know how important it was for me to produce this project until
I had started it.” Simon handled the co-creative, character design,
storyboards, animatics, directing, producing and editing of the spot...

Excerpts:
Orlando-based A&S Animation and Raven Moon Entertainment are teaming
up to develop a series of animated Bible story shorts called A
Message From God which are geared towards children ages 3 to 6.

The one-minute stories, written by A&S' Jeanne Pappas
Simon, start with a brother and sister arguing about a situation they
are in. One of the kids then uses a Bible story to support their argument.

The animated shorts were done using two distinctive
styles, Simon notes. The kids are drawn in a classic animation fashion,
and the biblical stories are done in a crayon-colored, paper-cutout
style, almost as if the kids did the animation themselves.

"The wonderful thing about the two distinctly different
styles is that we didn't resort to a wavy or fuzzy picture to show
when we're transitioning into a biblical story, like we've seen a
hundred times," says Jeanne Simon.

Orlando
Business JournalDecember 07, 2001

An Animated Affair:

Motion system animates local video project

Using
a motion-capture system is nothing new to Hollywood, which has had
great success with it in films such as Final Fantasy and The
Matrix.

In Central Florida, however, use of the technology has been rare.

Until now.

A&S Animation used motion capture for a recent video project for The Automotive Coalition for Traffic
Safety.

And if A&S Animation President Mark Simon has his way, using motion
capture will become a more common production tool for the local film
and TV industry.

The Wayne Brady Show

August 15, 2001
ABC

Mark appears with Wayne on his hit ABC show.

On the third episode of Wayne Brady's new hit variety show, Mark
hams it up with Wayne in front of millions of viewers. At the top
of the show, Wayne asked who came the farthest to see the show. Mark's
tiny voice (those of you who know Mark know we're joking) yelled
out "Orlando".

Wayne responded, "Orlando! Dude, I'm from Orlando. C'mon down
here." Wayne ran into the audience and Mark joined him on the
floor. Wayne then introduced Mark to the world as his twin brother.

Life doesn't get much better than this.

What does this have to do with Mark's storyboarding and animation?
Nothing, we just think it's really cool.

Excerpts:
A series of one-minute animated shorts featured in the Spike &
Mike Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation nationwide, Timmy's
Lessons are the brainchild of Mark Simon, president of Orlando-based
Animatics & Storyboards, Inc. and A&S Animation, Inc..

"It's a big deal for us," says Simon of Timmy's featured appearance
in the Spike & Mike traveling film festival. "A very big
deal."

Indeed, it is.

The Spike & Mike Classic Festival of Animation and its
companion film festival, the Sick and Twisted Festival, have
showcased some of the world's best animators, including Tim Burton
(Batman), John Lasseter (director of Toy Story), and,
of course, the artist behind the now-infamous Beavis and Butthead.
Spike & Mike, in fact, produced the first two Beavis &
Butthead shorts long before the series' debut on MTV.

"They look for the best shorts they can find, so to get chosen is
a huge honor for us," Simon says. "Even if the festival's humor is
a little, well, unusual."

Press Release
September 26, 2001

Animation company designs Super campaign for Realtor

Texas
Realtor ®, Ted Simon, has hired Orlando
animation company, A&S Animation, Inc., to develop a new marketing
campaign for his business. Mark Simon, president of A&S Animation, Inc. and Ted's son, has designed campaigns for Ted before. In the
mid-80's producer Mark Simon owned an award-winning print advertising
agency, Nomis Creations, in Houston, Texas. In 1988, Mark's company
designed a campaign that won his father the Best Re/Max Farming Agent
award for the state of Texas. Farming is a real estate term that describes
marketing for clients.

The new campaign consists of 12 monthly color flyers that portrays
Ted as a Superman-style character, Super Realtor®. While the Super
Realtor® character catches peoples attention, it's actually his
alter ego, Ted Simon, who is the star of the ads. Each month, readers
find out another personal aspect of Ted's life. For instance, the
first flyer shows Ted captaining a sail boat and the sixth one shows
him skiing the Rockies.

"I took each personal element of Ted's that was shown in the flyers
and used a relevant term to compare his interests to his ability to
sell homes." says Mark. "For instance, the flyer describing Ted's
21 years as a top engineer for Shell Oil ends with the statement,
'Ted will engineer the best deal for your home!' We've found over
the years that ads for realtors that reflect the person, not the job,
have the best results."

ASIFA (International Animation Society) NewsletterNovember 1998

Create MagazineSeptember 2001

Choosing an Animation Style Based on What's Right, Not on What's
Possible

Excerpts:
Once a decision has been made to animate a project the choice between
cel, computer graphics (CG), claymation or a combination of different
techniques needs to be determined. This may sound like a dubious dilemma,
but it's very important when dealing with clients. Because of the proliferation
and publicity of computer graphics in animation, many clients think
that all animation is computer generated and that it's cheaper. They
are wrong on both counts.

Cel animation is ideal for cartoons and character animation; while,
computer animation is best suited for logos, realistic objects, product
shots, special effects, and certain types of characters. CG and cel
animation are also generally equivalent in budgets. This statement
is echoed by Pixar's John Lasseter in the January 5, 1998 issue of
The Hollywood Reporter.

There are certain types of projects that are best animated by hand
and others that are suited to computer animation. Artistic problems
crop up when a project is animated without regard to artistic style
and subjective issues, or just because it's possible, not because
it's right for the project.

Press Release May 18,
2001

A&S Animation, Inc. releases new animation series
in film, video and FLASH simultaneously

Excerpts:
Orlando, Fl - Orlando animation house, A&S Animation, Inc. has launched
a new short-form animation series, Lessons In Nature, in film,
broadcast video and FLASH animation for the web. "Since we are capable
of multi-purposing our animation assets, it only makes sense to design
our re-use to gain the greatest exposure possible." says Mark Simon,
producer and co-director of the series. While other animations have
been created for broadcast and have been re-purposed for the web, and
vise-versa, Lessons In Nature is the first to be launched in
all three arenas simultaneously.

The big screen premiere of Timmy's Lessons In Nature will
happen in the summer of 2001 in the touring Spike & Mike Festival
of Animation. The festival will tour 50 cities in North America.
Timmy will star in 3 shorts in this years festival.

Lessons In Nature is a series of one minute long sight gags
where the moron star of the show, Timmy unwittingly demonstrates,
with one disaster after another, basic wild life survival rules, such
as: Avoid Snakes, Don't Feed the Animals and more. Every episode is
filled with laughs for everyone in the family. The show is dialogue-free
for international appeal.

Excerpts:
The kids TV network auctions off a ton of items as bidders mourn the
end of an era at the Orlando studio.

It was the usual crowd for a funeral. Some serious mourners. Some
curious onlookers. And more than a few opportunists with eyes full
of dollar signs.

But the sweaty crowd gathered in a dusty warehouse Tuesday afternoon
wasn't marking the passing of a person.

"It's sad. It definitely means the end of an era," said
Mark Simon, 37, a former Nick art director who now runs his own Orlando
animation company, Animatics & Storyboards.

Simon was one of several former Nick employees high-fiving each other
and sharing old stories at the auction. They talked of fellow former
coworkers who already had moved to New York or California, looking
for production work.

Mingled with the Nick refugees were men in baseball caps and T-shirts,
with tape measures hanging form their belt loops.

The whir of industrial fans struggling to make a dent in the musty
air joined the echoing drone of auctioneers from Karlin Daniel &
Associates calling "Heyhamana hamana who'll give me fifty hamana
hebbada sixty, do I have seventy hamana..."

Four hours later, Nickelodeon coffers were richer. How rich? Nick
couldn't say as of Thursday, but tens of thousand of dollars richer,
undoubtedly. Maybe more.

Meanwhile, people such as Mark Simon had preserved a memory.

"My wife'll kill me, but I had to have it," the former Nick employee
said of a lopsided, yellow crushed-velvet chair he once designed for Welcome, Freshmen. He paid $120, plus tax and 10 percent auctioneer's
fee, for the chair.

"I had to get it back," Simon said as he struggled to roll the chair
out the door.

Press
Release
February 7, 2001

Excerpts: Orlando Artist Releases Latest Book

Orlando- Mark Simon, owner of Animatics & Storyboards, Inc. has
released the second edition of his book, Storyboards: Motion In
Art. Published by Focal Press,
Simon's latest book adds 45 new chapters and over 500 new samples
beyond his previous edition.

Storyboards (boards) act as a blueprint for film and tv production,
much as a set of plans helps a contractor to build a house. A finished
set of boards for a project may be many hundreds or thousands of drawings
that loosely resemble a comic book. A production crew uses these boards
to produce the project the way the director envisions it.

Simon and his company have designed and boarded on over 1,000 projects
during his more than 13 years in the industry. His clients include
NBC, HBO, Nickelodeon, seaQuest DSV, The Waterboy, FOX,
NFL, major theme parks and many others. The knowledge he gained from
those projects and numerous different directors is gathered together
into his new text.

Markee Magazine

June 2001

Animatics: Getting off on the right frame

by: Brigitte Marie Hoarau

Excerpts:

Before the days of videotape, storyboards visualized key aspects
of a production before shooting began. While storyboards are still
instrumental to visualization, animatics have take the concept one
step further by producing those previsualized images on videotape.
Though the quality of an animatic can be high enough for a limited-animation
final product, animatics are largely used for presentation purposes
such as market testing, approvals and preproduction.

Mark Simon, president of Orlando's Animatics & Storyboards,
Inc., says using animatics for previsualization often saves a great
deal of money in the long run because the productions run more quickly
and smoothly, and the client is able to get exactly what he or she
wants. Simon's animatics and storyboards have been used by HBO, MTM
and Nickelodeon, as well as Amblin Entertainment's seaQuest DSV .

Animatic
presentations also work well in selling concepts to the client, since
"a lot of people can't see in their heads what you're talking about
with just still drawings," Simon explains. Working with Soundelux,
Animatics & Storyboards recently designed the video wall content
for NASA's new expansion of the East Visitor's Wing, winning Soundelux
the opportunity to create the finished product. "What you see in there
now is very close to what I had envisioned with the animatic," Simon
says.

Excerpts:
Mark Simon is a real-life example of someone who creates the one picture
that is easily worth a thousand words- or, as he like to point out
in his book Storyboards: Motion In Art, one picture can be
worth more than $1,000 to a TV or film producer...Simon, 32, is a
storyboard artist, or "translator" - an artist who takes a film or
TV script and visually represents the ideas on paper...

But film and TV are only a small part of what Simon and his wife,
Jeanne Pappas Simon, do... they are expanding their business into
new areas, including what Mark Simon calls corporate storyboarding
- using storyboards and animation in the boardroom to make presentation
- and even Web site animation.

The potential for growth "is endless," Mark Simon says, "because most
business people don't have any idea of the possibilities of what can
be done through storyboards and animation."

The Simons moved to Orlando in 1989.... and found work as freelancers
for Nickelodeon. It was also at Nickelodeon that Jeanne Simon, 36,
went on to work as a producer, line producer and unit manager on such
hits as Clarissa Explains It All and Weinerville, building
a reputation as one of the most respected producers in children's
television today, according to Mitchel Kriegman, the creative producer
for Clarissa Explains It All.

"Both Jeanne and Mark have great creative eyes," Kriegman says. "They're
the best, absolutely, and their work is in demand."

Glenn Wilder, second unit director for McHale's Navy, says
in working with storyboard artists, Mark Simon's name always comes
up.

"He's very good at what he does and has a good reputation in the industry,"
Wilder says. "People know they're going to get something done well
with Mark & Jeanne."

Mark Simon says along the way he realized how easy it would be to
incorporate animatics into work for corporate clients.

"When we were hired to do this presentation with Disney Business Productions
for Yamaha, I came up with the idea of doing something different involving
animatics," Mark Simon says.

We did the usual (presentation) stuff with them at first, then I asked
the Yamaha reps if they would like to see what it would be like to
actually go through the annual water vehicle rollout show they were
working on first person. They were absolutely floored and said they
had never seen anything like it before."

Even more important for Simon and Disney: "They bought into the Disney
proposal right there on the spot."

..."I can't imagine having a better job," Mark Simon adds. "I get
to draw, still be a big kid and work in film and TV. Does it get much
better than this? I don't think so."

Excerpts:
Before the cameras recorded the action, Mark Simon's pencil brought
the characters and action of seaQuest DSV to life. Simon was the
storyboarder for Spielberg's science fiction series... Though most
artists have only a vague idea of what storyboarding is, Simon says
it's fun and lucrative. But you have to be quick on the draw to
succeed...

You'll need skills at drawing the human body, proficiency at perspective,
and a good understanding of spatial relationships.... As many as
200 crew members might be reading the same storyboards and every
single person on that crew must derive the same meaning from them
to work together effectively...

Though Simon has moved from LA to Orlando, he still gets plenty
of storyboarding assignments. He works on commercials, creates storyboards
for Disney and Universal Studios in Orlando, art directs, lectures
on opportunities for artists within the entertainment industry,
and is the author of Storyboards: Motion in Art (1994, Nomis
Creations). "Storyboarding is a tremendous creative outlet," he
says, "You get to sit in a movie theater and see your art come to
life."

Excerpts:
"I take a script and an idea and I illustrate what it's going to
end up being in motion. [says Mark Simon, storyboarder of SeaQuest]...

"If you can look at storyboards and tell what's happening without
reading anything, they're successful... Drawing a pretty picture
does not necessarily make motion sense... It's getting the
idea across, more than the art itself, which makes a storyboard
successful.

... in the film and television industry, a picture is not worth
a thousand words, but actually much more than a thousand dollars. The importance of this visual blueprint of a production's
flow of action and design can't be underestimated or overlooked...

..Simon brings years of experience in a diverse number of fields
to his job as one of seaQuest's storyboard artists. At age
12, he designed skateboards for Schwinn Bikes, and he later ran
a small advertising company, published his own collegiate magazine,
syndicated his own weekly cartoons and managed a custom home building
company. It is this variety which lends a fresh perspective to his
creative pursuits. "For the past 15 years, I've been running huge
crews, overseeing a ton of money... What I'm doing now is totally
creative, and that's empowering."

...Simon's business experience has helped him avoid many of the
pitfalls other creatives encounter, and his books share these valuable
insights with his readers. "I've never been a 'starving artist'
and I've never sold out. But I know business, and that has a lot
to do with it. I write about the cold, hard facts: how you work,
what the options are, how to make your stuff better. I'm not getting
into the theory of design--you go to school to learn that."

.. I'm passing along the little things I've learned that I wish
I had known before. I've talked with tons of other art directors
and they all said, "God, if I had only known... if there was some
way to learn this stuff."

Excerpts:
Success came to Parkway Middle School Thursday with a typical artist's
flair.

Sporting a goatee and black tennis shoes, Mark Simon echoed the banner
on the cafeteria wall, which read, "Reach for the Stars. Your Success
at Parkway Begins Today."

About 150 students in Katie Froehle's art classes jammed the room
to hear Simon. The successful storyboard artist, who boasts Disney
and Nickelodeon as clients, explained how his profession is not just
fun but can be lucrative, too.

I wake up every morning excited about what I do for a living. How
many people can say that?" he said. If you love art, be an artist.
It's the greatest thing in the world."

Simon wants students to know they can make a living by doing what
makes them happy.

Perhaps it was the Hot Wheels and the hot-pink "Workout Barbie" he
used during his talk, or maybe it was the mere mention of his association
with Steven Spielberg, but the children ate up his lively performance,
even clamoring for autographs at the end.

Milton Torres, 11, a sixth-grader who also loves to draw, said he
learned that "you can earn a lot of money doing art."

Over the past year, the Orlando-based Simon has spoken at area schools
to share his love of art and dispel the notion that one has to be
a "starving artist."

Simon, 33, said he has been an artist since he started designing skateboards
as a teenager. After graduating from art school, he left his hometown
of Houston for Hollywood, working as an art director and set construction
coordinator before finding his niche as a storyboard artist.

Froehle, the teacher who invited Simon to speak, seemed impressed
with her students' enthusiasm. "This will open their eyes about what
they're able to do with art," she said.

Excerpts:
One minute Mark Simon was on the stage, and the next he was crawling
across the top of a table. Nearly every one of the 150 middle-schoolers
from Osceola County's Parkway Middle School watched intently, caught
up as much in the words as in the uninhibited behavior of the man
leaping back onto the stage from the table.

Simon's message, delivered almost immediately during the Thursday
morning assembly of the school's art students: "Who wants to make
money having fun for the rest of their lives?"

That message carried credibility in part because Simon told the students
his Orlando company, Animatics & Storyboards, regularly works with
clients like Disney, Universal, HBO, and Nickelodeon.

And with this audience, he knows what buttons to push: He talks about
getting to walk through new theme park attractions before they open,
about working with movie stars and directors, of a perpetual casual-dress
day.

"I get paid for doing this!" Simon exults. "I get paid to run around
and do all this stuff, to dress however I want. I don't have to wear
a tie because I 'm an artist."

But not a starving one, he quickly adds "There's more work for artists
out there than all of us together could do. I stumble into work all
the time," says Simon. "I have never been a starving artist for the
20 years I've been doing it, and I've never worked for anyone else."